Pedro Almodóvar vs. Antonio Banderas

On the occasion of the release, in France, of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, “The Skin I Live In” (which will be screened in October at the New York Film Festival), its star, Antonio Banderas—who got his start in Almodóvar’s films in the nineteen-eighties but hasn’t been in any since “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” in 1990—is profiled, in Le Journal du Dimanche, by Barbara Théate, who discusses with him the twenty-year gap in their collaboration:

In 1991, Almodóvar offered him a part in “Kika.” But, in the meantime, Banderas had been offered the lead role in an American production, “The Mambo Kings.” The opportunity was too good, but the insult was terrible. “Pedro had very hard words for me: ‘Hollywood will break you, you’ll waste your talent. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ ”

They remained in touch, though the director also “always remained critical” of the actor’s work, Banderas said. “He had created me, I was in a way his thing. He saw my departure like a betrayal. He needed some time before he could forgive me.”

Three points to make: first, last week, I posted about Juliane Lorenz’s recollections of working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose attitude, she said, was the opposite of Almodóvar’s: she mentioned that, though Fassbinder liked to work with a regular group of actors and technicians, he encouraged them to find their independence and make a career apart from him—and that it was they who felt rejected and betrayed by his unfamilial attitude.

Second: yesterday, I posted about Sean Penn’s avowed incomprehension of what Terrence Malick wanted from him in the making of “The Tree of Life.” Here’s how Banderas described his recent shoot with Almodóvar:

There’s no point to giving your opinion…. How many times did I hear him say, “The ideas are my business. Be happy with acting them correctly.”

I’d bet that Malick didn’t say anything of the kind to Penn.

Third, a hypothesis: one of the key influences in the contemporary cinema—especially the more commercially viable specimens of the European cinema—is Jean-Pierre Melville, whose film “The Red Circle” Almodóvar asked Banderas to watch—as a result of which, Théate writes, “the actor did everything he could to resemble Alain Delon,” Melville’s star. Banderas explains:

Like him, I didn’t want anything to be read on my face. I had to become the opposite of myself—glacial, calculating, everything restrained and economical. It wasn’t always easy.

I think it’s safe to say that Melville’s name will be invoked on several forthcoming occasions in the next little while; last year, it was also often cited regarding Anton Corbijn’s film “The American,” and, at that time, I wrote here about the connection. In the sixties, Melville wasn’t very happy with the way the cinema or the world was going, and his films are laced with his aching sense of loss. I’m not sure whether those who borrow his styles now—even when they do so with a comparable nostalgia for an earlier era of cinema—catch the same pathos of untimeliness, because, unlike Melville, they haven’t personally experienced the era they miss. He saw a whole world vanish before his eyes—and, ironically, was credited with encouraging and abetting the revolutionaries in their plot (i.e., the French New Wave).

Photograph: Sony Pictures Classics.

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